A Legacy of Giving: The Lady Leslie and Lord Paul Ridley-Tree Collection
Paul Signac, Herblay – The Riverbank (op. 204), 1889. Oil on canvas. Gift of Lord and Lady Ridley-Tree, 2001.65
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Merciless Lady, 1865. Watercolor and bodycolor on paper. Bequest of Leslie L. Ridley-Tree, 2023.25.30.
Mary Cassatt, Sara in a Bonnet (no. 1), c. 1901. Pastel. Bequest of Leslie L. Ridley-Tree, 2023.25.38.
For over 25 years, Lady Leslie and Lord Paul Ridley-Tree generously supported the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in its mission “to integrate art into the lives of people.” They understood that acquiring art and building on the museum’s already strong holdings was essential. Through outright donations or partial underwriting, they brought 58 artworks into the Museum’s collection, most of which came as a recent bequest from Leslie Ridley-Tree.
This exhibition focuses on the Ridley-Tree’s gifts of primarily nineteenth-century British and French paintings. It will contain artworks by such luminaries as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Paul Signac, Claude Monet, Childe Hassam, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Pissarro, Henri Fantin-Latour, Eugène Boudin, and Gustave Courbet. The Ridley-Trees were particularly taken with the lush landscapes of the French Barbizon School (active 1830-1870), who painted the forests of Fontainebleau not far from Paris. Artists such as Charles François Daubigny, Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, Charles Émile Jacque, Francois Auguste Ortmans, and Théodore Rousseau depicted ponds fringed with vegetation, productive farmland, and forests with sturdy hardwoods, like oaks and chestnuts.
Beyond celebrating these gifts, this presentation uses them as educational tools to learn about a turbulent century whose dizzying changes in technology and culture set the stage for today. Using the collection this way fits Ridley-Tree’s belief in education—and art education specifically—to open minds to new perspectives.
Free* docent-led gallery tours are conducted daily and meet in Ludington Court near the State Street entrance. Tours provide an engaging opportunity to experience and discuss a variety of works in a relaxed, informal setting.
Tour Availability
| 1 pm |
|---|
| July: 7, 10, 12, 13, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 26, 28, 30, 31 |
| August: 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31 |
| September: 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 14, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 29 |
| October: 3, 5, 8, 10, 11 (11:30 am), 13, 16, 19, 22, 25, 26, 30 |
| November: 1, 2, 3 |
*free with the price of admission
Family 1st Thursday
Thursday, August 1
5:30 – 7:30 pm
FREE
Bring the whole family to enjoy Teaching Artist-led activities in the Museum’s Family Resource Center. Layer three colors of paint onto yellow paper to create your own landscape print inspired by Alfred Sisley’s Springtime in Moret-sur-Loing (1890). Afterward, enjoy the galleries until 8 pm.
Studio Sunday
Sunday, August 11
Family Resource Center
1:30 – 4:30 pm
FREE
Visitors of all ages are invited to participate in this hands-on drop-in workshop with SBMA Teaching Artists. Each month, explore a different medium—clay, metal, ink, wood, photography, paper—inspired by works of art in the Museum’s collection or special exhibitions
In August, select reproductions of your favorite paintings in A Legacy of Giving and design simple or elaborate frames for the works by using black and gold crayons and metallic tempera paint.
Family 1st Thursday
Thursday, September 5
5:30 – 7:30 pm
FREE
Bring the whole family to enjoy Teaching Artist-led activities in the Museum’s Family Resource Center. Add color and texture to a black and white reproduction of Claude Monet’s Afternoon on the Seine (1897) with oil pastels and blend the colors with baby oil to finish. Afterward, enjoy the galleries until 8 pm.
Sunday, September 8
1 – 4 pm
FREE
Celebrating A Legacy of Giving with related art activities, family gallery guides, docent tours, music, and refreshments. Informal musical performances by the Slideways Trombone Quartet, the Bottom Line Brass, and others throughout the afternoon.
Performance of Carrot Revolution
Saturday, July 20
3 pm
FREE with Museum admission
The Music Academy of the West’s Arancia Quartet, made up of 2024 String Quartet Seminar fellows, perform Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution. The piece—originally commissioned by an art museum—is a patchwork of Smith’s wildly contrasting influences, unexpected juxtapositions, and intersecting planes of sound, celebrating the spirit of fresh observation.
In collaboration with The Music Academy of the West
Thursday, July 25
5:30 – 7 pm
FREE
Enjoy jazz composed and performed by students in SBCC’s Summer Jazz program in a collaborative workshop with Grammy Award-winning composer and musician Ted Nash.
Inspired by works in A Legacy of Giving and Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree’s love of music and support of education.
Sunday, August 25
1 – 4 pm
FREE with Museum admission
In collaboration with the Santa Barbara Symphony and pairing music with art from A Legacy of Giving in a series of pop-up performances in the galleries throughout the day.
Thursday, September 5
5 – 5:45 pm
FREE
Celebrate Opera Santa Barbara’s season featuring selections from both opera and popular songs beloved by Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree.
Sunday, September 8
1 – 4 pm
FREE
Celebrating A Legacy of Giving with related art activities, family gallery guides, docent tours, music, and refreshments. Informal musical performances by Mariachi Las Olas de Santa Barbara, the Slideways Trombone Quartet, and the Bottom Line Brass.
Art Matters Lecture with Dr. Hollis Clayson
Mary Cassatt’s Alterity and her Radical Modernism
Sunday, October 13
3 pm
FREE Students and Teachers
$10 SBMA Members / $15 Non-Members
Hollis Clayson, Ph.D.
Professor Emerita of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor Emerita in the Humanities, Northwestern University
Owing to her American passport, identity as an upper-class woman, family money, and her identification with the Impressionist group in Paris, Cassatt's choice of subjects, and the style of both her painting and intaglio printmaking were singular. The lecture will focus on the radical monstrosity of her so-called "mother and child" pictures, and the technical virtuosity and indirection of her intaglio prints. It's high time we acknowledged the inventiveness of her work.
Hollis Clayson is Professor Emerita of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Northwestern University, where she taught for 35 years. She is a Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and the 2024 College Art Association Distinguished Scholar. Her scholarship centers on diverse Paris-based art practices, and her books include Painted Love: Prostitution in the Art of the Impressionist Era Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege, 1870-1871 (2002), Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900 (2016, co-edited with André Dombrowski), and Paris Illuminated: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque (2019). She has also studied and published essays on the interior and the threshold, intaglio printmaking as an integral component of modernism, and art produced within social and political networks of transatlantic exchange. Her current book underway is entitled The Dark Side of the Eiffel Tower.
Adult Art Studio Class En Plein Air at Lotusland
Saturday, October 26
1 – 4 pm
$125 Lotusland + SBMA Members / $150 Non-Members
In collaboration with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, artists of all levels are invited to paint en plein air in the gardens under the influence of the painters of the Barbizon School who found their inspiration in the French countryside, and whose work is on view in the current exhibition A Legacy of Giving: The Lady Leslie and Lord Paul Ridley-Tree Collection.
Advance reservations are required
Large Format Labels. Large format labels of exhibition texts are available at the visitor services desk.
For a full list of on-site accommodations for guests, please see our accessibility page sbma.net/visit/accessibility
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